David Toop
David Toop (born 5th May 1949, Enfield, London, England) is a musician, writer and sound curator. He has recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas, appeared on Top Of The Pops with The Flying Lizards, worked with musicians including Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Scanner, Ivor Cutler, and collaborated with artists from many other disciplines. As a critic and columnist he has written for many publications, including The Wire, The Face, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Village Voice.
David Toop (born 5th May 1949, Enfield, London, England) is a musician, writer and sound curator. He has recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas, appeared on Top Of The Pops with The Flying Lizards, worked with musicians including Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Scanner, Ivor Cutler, and collaborated with artists from many other disciplines. As a critic and columnist he has written for many publications, including The Wire, The Face, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Village Voice.
Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedo
**2019 stock** In this first installment of acclaimed music writer David Toop's interdisciplinary and sweeping overview of free improvisation, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970 introduces the philosophy and practice of improvisation (both musical and otherwise) within the historical context of the post-World War II era. Neither strictly chronological, or exclusively a history, Into the Maelstrom investigates a wide range of improvisational tendencies:…
Whirled Music
Black Truffle present a reissue of a landmark UK release, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell, and David Toop's Whirled Music, originally released on Quartz in 1980. Remastered and cut at 45RPM by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. Includes a 24-page booklet with archival materials and notes from David Toop, alongside contemporary reviews, flyers, notes on the instruments and performance documentation; Gatefold sleeve."[Whirled Music is] one of the key documents of the inventi…
Suttle Sculpture
Never before released recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions with David Toop and Paul Burwell in Brussels, on May 7, 1977. David Toop on the recordings: "When Paul Burwell and I started playing together just after Christmas, 1969, we found ourselves wrestling with a new language of sound, listening, actions, objects and space. At first it was music. We studied in the improvisation classes given by John Stevens at Ealing College in 1971-2, and also took classes in African music at London'…
Live at White Cube
In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. The second performance is with David Toop.David Toop is a composer/musician, author and curator based in London who has w…
Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul - Yanomami Shamanism, Songs
2016 repress. Recordings from 1978 by David Toop of Yanomami ritual songs, shamanistic ceremonies, and rainforest sounds. The voices of spirits and animal familiars, ventriloquial illusions of sound in dark spaces, secret spirit languages, the clap of thunder that links shamanic trance with the sleep language of Finnegans Wake... Out of these passages of the everyday, intensity flares like flames caught by a gust of wind. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows up havoc as the spirits m…
Entities Inertias Faint Beings
"The music existed already, spores maybe or dormant clusters of digital files. Out of three periods of solitude the germination began. The first was in Queensland, on Tamborine Mountain (an aboriginal name), so silent at night that I listened to recorded music - Japanese Gagaku, Buddhist ritual from Bhutan, Korean Confucian music - as if drifting into cavernous black space. Stepping into sleep I saw a hypnagogic image - a transparent swimming pool suspended over the mouth of a volcano. I read St…
Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul - Yanomami Shamanism, 1978
Mixed by Lawrence English. Recordings from 1978 by David Toop of Yanomami ritual songs, shamanistic ceremonies, and rainforest sounds. The voices of spirits and animal familiars, ventriloquial illusions of sound in dark spaces, secret spirit languages, the clap of thunder that links shamanic trance with the sleep language of Finnegans Wake... Out of these passages of the everyday, intensity flares like flames caught by a gust of wind. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows up havoc as t…
Life on the Inside
Limited edition of 300, already sold out at source. David Toop's environmental beauty Life on the Inside is the audio companion (created and recorded in 2015) to French sculptor Pierre Besson's 2014 exhibition D'objets noires et de Choses carrées (Black Objects and Square Things). This 34-minute ambient track was diffused inside of the sculpture and has never been published before. An excellent addition to the David Toop discography and a must for any wide-ranging ambient fan."Musician, write…
Deadly Weapons
Recent digipack CD reissue "This collective of jazz improv weirdoes banded together for a one-off in 1986 to riff on the deep vibe of all things French and cinematic. Backing vocalist Toni Marshall, Zorn, Beresford, and Toop created a virtual and highly experimental film noir soundtrack to a movie that perhaps existed in the mind of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1950s, but was never made. David Toop is clearly the sonic architect here, haunting the proceedings with his deep use of effects, subdued perc…
Mondo Black Chamber
Sub Rosa recordings 1996-2003: the complete series of works made by David Toop for the Belgian Sub Rosa label, housed in a lovely deluxe double CD set. "It is amazing that an artist active since the 1970s can still reach new heights in 2003 without repeating himself. Young experimental electronica and electro-acoustic composers could learn many lessons from David Toop, especially from his Black Chamber. The pacing, the variety in moods and textures, the artistry of the electronic treatments -- e…
Sound body
2006 release, first time in stock: David Toop populates the five strung-out and diffuse compositions on Sound Body with sonic events captured all over the world. The Japanese sound artist Haco plucks rubber bands in Kobe; guitarist Rafael Toral captures oscillating feedback in Lisbon; Günter Müller knocks stones together in northern Switzerland. These contributions are not so much blended as balanced, like the loops and spheres of an Alexander Calder mobile; they shiver and sway in the artificia…
Wunderkammern
David Toop laptop, steel guitar, flutes, percussive devices. Rhodri Davies harp, ebows, electronics, preparations. Lee Patterson amplified devices, field recordings. Recorded by Dave Hunt at Dave Hunt Studio, London, 24 July 2006. Magnificent, tight studio recordings from 2006 by a trio of UK improvisers of different generations, coming together to create a rich and strange soundworld of whispered, scraped and quietly haunting reverberations.
Haunted Weather
Digital technology has changed the ways in which music is perceived, stored, distributed, mediated and created. The world of music is now a vast and complex jungle, teeming with CDs, MP3s, concerts, clubs, festivals, conferences, exhibitions, installations, websites, software programmes, scenes, ideas and competing theories. In the eye of the storm stands David Toop, shedding light on the most interesting music now being made - on laptops, in downtown bars in Tokyo, wherever he finds it. "Haunte…
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden - A Portrait
A fascinating ninety-minute film capturing David Toop at home with his record collection, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden not only gives an insight into the sounds most important to the renowned composer, author and Wire journalist, it also lets you hear them for yourself, switching as it does between Toop in discussion about the music and isolated playback against a black screen. Being a very fine music journalist and theorist, Toop makes an excellent candidate for a film like this. He's unc…
Cholagogues
Here is an extraordinary excavation from the buried history of improvised music, “Cholagogues” is a re-issue of the LP released by the musicians’ collective label Bead in 1977 and, since then, out of stock. The re-mastered album is composed of a single long rack based on a performance at Action Space in London, 1st of April 1977. The performance, reported to be the first and possibly the last of this trio, was recorded by David Toop on a Sony TC164A cassette tape machine and was created with a v…
Breath - taking
Since an appearance at Derek Bailey’s Company Week in the late 1970s, Suzuki’s visits to the UK have been few. The day after his British Museum show he played an improvised duo with David Toop at the Sound 323 record shop in Highgate. This was a delicate, probing set, in which Suzuki got much mileage from a polished brass plate, spun, scraped and hit. Toop meanwhile moved from crackling dried flower stalks to dog whistles, and embarked on adventures in feedback oozing from a microphone beneath a…